Monday, November 07, 2005

Place IV (Plant Terms)

Monday, November 07, 2005Place IV (Plant Terms)

Scott flew to Asia last Tuesday. Halloween night I lay in my night still wearing fishnet stockings, a funky floor length dress and Mardi Gras beads. We stayed on the phone until we could no longer force ourselves awake.

About at the time we could barely function we started to talk a little about his trip. I asked if he had ever considered that to be able to feel grounded, perhaps it might be advantageous to stay in one place for a while. Grounded. Roots. Uprooting. We use plant terms for this sort of thing.

How can someone be grounded if they keep uprooting and traveling? Traveling fosters other things, but is being grounded one of them? I argued on the side of the negative. In fact, I started to gather momentum in my little speech to the point where words seemed to be coming out of my mouth without any input from my brain. I’m not even certain if Scott contributed anything at all to my diatribe. When I finished he only told me he needed to go to sleep.

The next morning I woke up a bit on the stressed side. I don’t believe that was the best tangent to go off on to someone who would be getting on a plane to travel for months by himself. I tried to bury the whole thing with yoga.

Yesterday I sat underneath a brilliant yellow tree having a pre-birthday brunch with Kim and Megan at Ike’s. Kim asked me how I felt about being back in town again. ‘I’m psyched!’ I told her. Then I thought about it for a moment and continued. ‘You know, I actually feel psyched too. I’m not just saying I’m psyched because intellectually I know I must be.’ And it’s true - I do feel it finally.

I’ve been trying to think about what it is that has made me feel it. I’m not really sure at this point. Before Scott left I started to put a lot of energy into developing some sort of somewhat regular routine. The regularity mostly consists of yoga a few mornings, but it’s a start. Things are going well in my studio. I like what I’m painting. It’s easier to walk in when I like what’s on the walls. The trees are changing colors in town. It’s still a novelty for me since I grew up in Southern California. I’ve been spending a lot of time with good friends who all live here. I’m not stressed about anything. I’m doing what I want to do everyday when I want to be doing it. In general, life is good. Life is good and I don’t want to be anywhere else. I feel grounded. I feel grounded and I don’t want to leave.

Other than the friends who are here, nothing is place specific. Place - that seems to be an external thing. Place. Sense of place. Connection to place? Is it even necessary? I want to be here now because of an internal peace. But I didn’t find that internal peace by remaining here.

A few days after Scott got on his plane I realized that I hadn’t really been speaking to him at all during my phone speech on becoming more like a plant. Instead it was a speech by me for me. I was trying to convince myself that I am happy because I am here. I needed to believe right then that to be grounded I need to stay here.

However, I don’t think that’s right at all. What’s closer to the truth perhaps is that I don’t need to stay here so therefore I’m grounded. I haven’t been living here since June. I’ve uprooted and moved around. But I feel grounded.

A new vocabulary needs to be put into play. Grounded. Roots. Uprooted. Plants are stationary. I have two legs. I move.

Thanks to the Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus: Explore. Inspire. Depart. All are related to roots, grounding and plants. None of those words hold any requirement of remaining in one place. In fact, they seem to defy it.

Develop roots through exploring. Feel grounded by inspiring. And with plants and planting I get back to roots. Explore substance – heart soul and essence. Isn’t that what you set out to do by getting on the plane?

About Me

We have been asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mocking bird on the chimney is singing… The real and proper question is: Why is it so beautiful? Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code. And it could be that for beauty, as it turned out to be for French, that there is no key, that ‘oui’ will never make sense in our language but only in its own, and that we need to start all over again, on a new continent, learning the strange syllables one by one.” - Annie Dillard.
I read that in the laundromat as I waited for my clothes to finish the spin cycle and it has sat pounding around in my head since, my Rosetta Stone. I thought I understood the river pretty well. But the more I see it from different angles, with different eyes, the more I realize I am only understanding the river at the level of the infant who botches speech utterly. I have found that new continent right in my own backyard and am now spending my days trying to learn the strange syllables of the river one by one.
Please visit my website http://leahwilson.com